Rukhsana Ahmad is a British-based Pakistani writer. A playwright, a screenwriter, a novelist and a translator, Ms. Ahmad has worn many hats. Most recently, her short story “Meeting the Sphinx” was featured in the anthology of Pakistani women writers published in India and the US titled ‘And the world changed’. I spoke to this talented writer about her journey as a writer.
Q. Could you please tell us why and how you started writing?
A. I started writing more than twenty years ago. After migrating to England through marriage, I studied at Reading University for a Masters course in English literature but that never got me a job. There was anyhow a surplus of teachers at that time so writing became a creative refuge. I started out professionally as a journalist as soon as all three of my children began school. Writing has been a form of resistance for me - often I write out of a sense of outrage over injustices. That sparks off ideas and ignites my need to write.
Early on, I wanted to write a book about the status of women in Pakistan. However, when I embarked upon it, I felt it would be too academic and too serious to be of general interest. Perhaps naively, I believed then that it was possible to influence ideas and mobilize people. I have been moved deeply enough by films, books and stories myself to have changed my perspective on something so I believed people can change their position if they read something powerful and truthful about a tragedy or injustice.
Beyond that, I do need to tell stories. I am interested in people's lives, I’m gregarious, I enjoy meeting, discovering and understanding people. And writing is a way of understanding and interpreting life. Drama in particular gives you the space to explore the ambiguities, the gray areas - the not so simple differences, the clash between black and white, the oppositions, the dilemmas from which we might wish to walk away in silence.
Q. You started with a novel then moved onto drama. How is fiction writing compared to drama?
A. Drama is a way of condensing stories. You create situations where you can see things, without feeling obliged to resolve them sometimes. You can create opposing points of view and frequently you discover that those clashes cannot be resolved because there are no simple answers.
Fiction also permits you to do that and both genres have certain contiguous areas, but because fiction explores interiorities more, you can sometimes explain things away. You can create a villain that your readers might empathize with and explain away more easily than you can with drama. In drama, characters might stand for certain choices and you see them at the height of the clash or conflict represented in the play.
Q. Would you say the visual element of drama allows the experience to be more real?
A. In a way. But then there is fiction that is very visual too, or sometimes sensual, for e.g. Marquez or Ondaatje’s writings. The visual element is important but I think drama condenses and distils the playwright’s vision within the framework of a performance. A novel is about the rhythm of life you can explore entire generations in the round with it. In drama, the constraints of time and space force you to simplify and align the issues in some way, set up the conflict and watch what ensues within a short span of time. The immediacy of the medium is what makes it exciting.
Q. So which medium do you prefer the most?
A. It’s difficult to say. I love storytelling and short stories. But more and more, drama seems to come easier to me and that has to do with the opportunities that have come my way and with my own infinite search for new things. I am doing some screenwriting as well now so I am finding it harder to keep up with my fiction - which is why revising my second novel has been so difficult. It gets relegated to the backburner because fiction does require much more focus and detailed work. You really need to isolate yourself from the rest of the world to concentrate on it, and be with it alone. It is much more about creating a world, rather than a few characters caught up in a crisis. It’s more complex and layered – more of a real slice of life rather than a heightened version of reality at a particular moment in time. I do love novels as a form not just for writing but also reading.
Q. How did you get started in theatre?
A. Ravinder Randhawa, a writer who had seen my work in the Asian Post, got in touch with me to see if I would like to join her writers’ workshop. This later became the Asian Women Writers’ Collective. The workshop often received notices for writers’ jobs. Tara Arts, the oldest Asian Theater group in London, needed a writer and commissioned me to write my first play. They subsequently commissioned me to do three or four other pieces, so it all started from there.
Q. How was the switch, from writing fiction to drama?
A. I had only just started writing fiction when I got commissioned to do my first theatre piece. I was quite daunted. The play was actually an improvised one - the actors, director and I researched the role of the Indian Army in the First World War then they improvised and I had to write a play based on their improvisations. It was a very lively and engaging experience. But it was also disconcerting on another level - I had come from a classical tradition of English literature, reading Shakespeare and the moderns, watching West End plays. Here was this work on the fringe of the fringe, which was quite experimental and I was concerned as to where and how my work fitted into what I knew about the theatrical tradition and the cultural context in which I was working.
Slowly I’ve moved from the fringe of the fringe to a more ‘established’ fringe. In due course, the work began to make sense and I began to tell stories in my own way and I have finally reached a place where I can say no to writing typical Asian themed plays and to actually selecting the subjects that interest me. That ability to pitch ideas, to get the work that you want was a very big step forward. In radio, I still get a mixture of both - recently I’ve been invited to dramatise some major novels for radio. I did ‘Midnight’s Children,’ ‘Maps for Lost Lovers’ and ‘The Inheritance of Loss’. It was very flattering.
Scenes from Mistaken - Annie Besant in India - photo © Robert Day/Vayu Naidu Company
Q. You have also done translations?
A. In 1990 I edited and translated a collection of feminist Urdu poetry in a volume entitled ‘We Sinful Women’. It contains quite a few of our radical poets, Fehmida Riaz, Kishwar Naheed, the late Sara Shagufta and Ishrat Aafreen. Also, Zehra Nigah – who is not often regarded as a feminist, so it is an interesting collection of works.
The novel that I chose to translate was also feminist in its orientation although I don't think Altaf Fatima would ever describe herself as such. It is a well-observed novel about the orthodoxies that constrain women’s spirits and their emotional development prohibiting them from free interaction with the outside world. It depicts a friendship between a young girl and a Chinese peddler. The girl, who is only 10 or 11, when the story begins becomes friendly with him, much to her family’s chagrin. It's very much about the child trying to discover ‘the Other’ and understand the world. So you can say I am interested in exploring women’s ability to get round the obstacles they constantly face in their lives.
Q. And what is the genesis of the interest in women's issues?
A. I suspect most women's feminism is experiential. I think we all discover it through the accidents of our lives: how we are constantly obstructed, how there is a glass ceiling, how our own bodies deny us complete liberation in terms of intellectual exploration and activity. Virginia Woolf’s phrase “kill the angel at the table” says it all - how violent, how ruthless, and determined you have to be to succeed because your own body tries to defeat you. A lactating mother’s body responds physically: her breasts weep when her baby cries. For me this was the ultimate physiological manifestation of that constraint. I found it quite fascinating.
My mother was very committed to our education, maybe because she had been denied it beyond school. After her matriculation, she was told by her widowed mother that there was money for her brother to go to college but none for her. So she was married off and had had seven children by the time she was 34. Ever since we were tiny, she kept telling us that while marriage is important for women, we absolutely had to have careers.
It began as well from seeing how difficult and confined women's lives are and discovering that the political changes taking place in Pakistan during Zia-ul-Haq’s time were going to make things worse. For me, there was also the coinciding of political and personal – just at that point in time in terms of family history.
I also became quite anti-religion as I saw it as another tool of oppression – the more compliant you are, the more it succeeds in oppressing you. And it becomes a bit of a circular problem because it is women who deliver the tradition. Unfortunately, sisterhood is not a successful concept – even though we share common experiences, we are divided not just by race, gender, faith, but also class, education, sexuality and political commitments. Another new division will probably arise between women who choose to have children versus those who don't. So … we stay divided.
Scenes from Mistaken - Annie Besant in India - photo © Robert Day/Vayu Naidu Company
Q. You are currently writing the screenplay for Nadeem Aslam’s ‘Map for Lost Lovers’?
A. That’s right. And we hope that it will soon become a film. The screenplay was funded by the UK Film Council. Our next step is to find a good director and look for funding. The book is an exceptional piece of work - it is a political novel that slates the negative interpretations of institutional Islam and underlines how the faith some of us are following has nothing to do with real Islam. But the most interesting thing about this novel is the character of the mother who I see as everyone's mother - in that there is a bit of everyone’s mother in her. A conduit for traditionalism, Kaukab, who is from an orthodox background did not get the opportunity for a good education and is so isolated that she becomes cruel and perverse. But though she is such a horrible character, she is an interesting one and Aslam manages to create a sense of empathy with her. The novel also has an amazing topography and extraordinary visual images, which should yield some memorable scenes.
Q. What would you say are some of the differences in the Pakistani diaspora writing in the UK versus the US?
A. Obviously the country you migrate to has a huge impact on your work. Then there are differences in the nature of the communities. I think the Pakistanis who came to work in the US were possibly more educated. The communities in the North of England came in little clumps because of strong colonial reasons and stayed huddled together to feel secure in a hostile climate. The British had an interest in making Mangla Dam, and they actually offered passports to a number of people who were displaced by it. Some people were relocated to Cleveland where they have all lived and created a little fossil of their own culture in which they're now stuck. In Bradford and Manchester people came to work in the cotton industry. In Britain, the immigration was largely a colonial import of manual labor.
In the US, the Asian community is from a higher social class, migrants in search of higher education and technical skills. It was much more expensive to travel to the US compared to the UK. The community here is scattered through out the US, so they are less fossilized. But I think you still have community nuclei in various states where people first arrived. Also, because people are so scattered and far away from home, they feel much more obliged to socialize and connect with each other.
But I also think where you grow up makes a huge difference to who you are and what you have to say. In my case, I am a first-generation migrant. I was 23 when I arrived, so I carried within me some indoctrination of culture, the blueprint, which, of course, began to fade and change within ten years. But the gift of migration is a new perspective on life, at least for those of us who choose to receive it. For that I'm extremely grateful. When you come to live in a different country, the host culture seldom feels that it has to make any effort to learn about you but you have to learn everything about them to survive. This grounding in two cultures is an asset. But I know my writing would be different from the writers born here and that my work may be closer to Bapsi Sidhwa’s and Sara Suleri’s who are based in the US but are also first generation migrants like me, than it would be to second-generation writers from the UK.
In some ways, Nadeem Aslam is an interesting writer because he is also a first generation arrival who moved out to England when he was very young. I think you bring with you a loyalty that cannot be replicated. The second generation’s loyalties for the homeland are negligible compared to ours. So there are degrees of separation and affiliation.
Scenes from 'Mistaken - Annie Besant in India' Annie Besant (Rosalind Stockwell),
Krishnamurti (Narinder Samra) photo © Robert Day/Vayu Naidu Company
Q You have termed migration as a gift. But immigration brings with it isolation and alienation for a number of people. How would you bridge the two?
A. I do view it as a gift. Certainly one cannot discount the alienation and isolation you feel when you migrate as a young person. But that is what forces you to think about the human condition - I think that sense of alienation and isolation gives you a clearer perspective on life.
And isolation is not peculiar to migrants: you can be part of the mainstream culture and still not belong: you might have a gender preference that sets you apart or a scar on your face. I suspect most writers frequently experience a degree of isolation and alienation that feeds their insights, and informs their vision of life giving depth to their writing. You only acquire that when you have observed, when you’ve lived long enough, read enough, suffered and understood a bit about life.
Having said all that, another of my favorite maxims is that you can grow older but not wiser. Two people with similar experiences can arrive at two totally different perspectives. So nothing is simple and nothing is easy. Writing, is a craft that requires rigorous application and a certain level of seriousness. And your biggest challenge as a woman is how to lead a fulfilled and balanced life while applying yourself to this craft. You have to be prepared to invest in your work a certain level of seriousness and the commitment to re-write.
The other big challenge for writers is opportunity. It is hard to write in a vacuum, you need to be very committed to write a novel in hopes of publication. And that’s why novels are harder because you have to invest so much time and effort into them before anyone shows any level of interest in the work.
Q. Who do you count among the influences that impact your writing?
A. It is very hard to name a single source because there are a lot of writers that I admire. My earliest influences were Urdu writers, Manto and Ismat Chughtai, who to this day remain great favorites. Amongst English writers, I love the Victorians, especially George Elliot and Jane Austen and amongst contemporaries I like the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ian McEwan, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Kiran Desai and Nadeem Aslam. I don't know if they are influences but they are great writers. My all time favorite is George Eliot's ‘Middlemarch’ but I also love Virginia Woolf’s work, James Joyce’s ‘The Dubliners,’.
Q. What has your theater experience been like?
A. Theater is very craft-oriented and people driven – people don’t like to work with people they don’t know because you have to work in a very close environment. It is quite hard to break into and I believe I was the first Asian woman playwright in the UK in my generation when I first started writing. I set up Kali Theater Company to provide learning opportunities for other Asian women and almost all of the playwrights around now, have had some contact with the Company.
Q. How long were you at Kali? What did Kali do?
A. I delivered projects for Kali for almost 13 years - first as a partner with Rita Wolf on a sporadic basis and then more regularly as the sole artistic director. At Kali, we offered writing workshops for Asian women who were new to writing plays and tried to market their work to other producers too. My role was that of a producer, and it involved a lot of interaction with people. I think, because theater is so craft-driven, time consuming and costly, unless someone is given support in the early stages of writing, it is hard to succeed.
Q. When and why did you leave Kali?
A. I left in 2003, basically because my overall commitments had increased significantly, both with Kali as well as with writing commissions. In the time I was with Kali, it was quite successful in its mission and the Arts Council gave us revenue funding. Overnight, my position was to become a full time paid position with many attendant responsibilities.
I wanted to start writing screenplays, which are also very technical and something that I tried to teach myself, so, with many changes happening in my life, I felt it best to take my leave of Kali.
Q. You were also involved with Salidaa?
A. Yes. I helped develop Salidaa (www.salidaa.org.uk) which is the South Asian Literature and Arts Archive in the Diaspora. It is a digital archive of South Asian artistic heritage. It is totally funds dependent and we were quite ambitious when we were building it: we wanted literature, visual arts and performance arts it has all five strands – music, theatre, visual arts, literature, dance. It was a beautiful thing to be involved with but it also sapped up a lot of my time.
Q. How long were you with the organization?
A. About 10 years. I helped to set it up in 1998 and I chaired it until last year. I’m convinced it is best to leave an organization that you have created and move on before too long. It can too easily become an albatross around your neck. People often question my decision about leaving Kali but I feel that position too was part of the organization not me.
Q. What has your involvement been on the teaching side?
A. I taught or actually provided writing support for students through the Royal Literary Fund. The placement is called a Fellowship and it happens during academic term time. I have worked 2 years at Queen Mary’s University of London and I’ll be going back this October for another year. Essentially, my role will be to provide professional writing advice to all students who come to me.
Q. What topics do you find of most interest to you?
A. Well, I have explored any number of issues. From a historical perspective, I have been interested in exploring the clash between the colonials and the colonized. For example, I wrote a play called ‘Mistaken – The Story of Annie Besant’ which was produced in England but toured widely in India too. Annie Besant is a British woman who went to India very much as a member of the empire but didn’t behave like a true colonial. She was, in fact, interested in reform. She is a larger than life figure: a feminist who believed in trade unions, got involved in the freedom struggle for India and then became quite hierarchical in her approach to India. She also decided she liked Brahmins much better than Muslims.
The story I chose to tell is about her and one of the two boys that she adopted. She believed that he had the special aura of a new messiah. It so happened that the boy was called Krishnamurti. With suggestions of sexual abuse surrounding them, the father of the boys wanted to take the children away from her and went to court. But when she lost in all the Indian courts, she took her case to the House of Lords where she won. Although by this time, the boys had gone from 12 to 17, so the issue of custody became moot.
She raised Krishna in the belief that he was going to be the new Messiah. But, at the age of 37, he decided that this was nonsense and rejected the role. He publicly denied the Messiah project and any suggestion of divinity and becoming instead quite an interesting philosopher and thinker.
So I explore two journeys: Annie’s from England where she was persecuted as a feminist for having written about contraception, when her husband, a clergyman, divorced her for promiscuity and took her children away quite unfairly. She traveled from England to India where she ultimately died. The other journey is Krishnamurti’s: he was adopted and sent to England and died in California. The story has no real villains in it. Annie behaves monstrously towards Krishna’s father and the boy Krishna himself by brain- washing him into thinking he is the Messiah. But on the other hand, she is involved in the freedom movement she helps to found the Congress party and fights for Indian liberation all her life. She clashes with Gandhi when he starts championing mass resistance because she wants to fight the British through constitutional means.
Q. What role do the men play in your stories/thinking?
A. Men are interesting but I do find them to be less so than women … perhaps because I understand women better. I haven’t written many plays where the leading characters are men. Having said that, the last play I wrote, ‘Letting Go,’ has an African male in the lead. It tells the story of a man who feels he has betrayed his younger sibling. It is a story of abandonment and the guilt of survival.
Apart from the Annie Besant story, I did write a play about Krisha in the lead. He’s a very interesting character with a complex mind and emotional makeup. Because he was so rigorously anti-hierarchical, and so anti-institutional, it was hard for the Krishna movement to grow too big. His teachings were essentially ‘follow your instincts to find your truth’. This play has not been produced yet.
In my new novel too, I have a trade union hero who is very sympathetic. So I suppose I am interested in characters who are larger than life, whether they are male of female.
Q. What is the name of your second novel?
A. I think I will call it ‘Sins’. It is set in Sindh and it is a love story crossed with a political story. It incorporates Peeri-Muridi and essentially looks at that institution and the impact it has on ordinary people’s lives. It highlights the relationship between feudalism and religion and the anti-education/anti-progress mindset it has produced. When I went to Sindh to research the book, I found that government schools were in some places occupied by the landlords. They’d simply taken them over and tied their cows in there. There is, of course, a connection between social justice and economics. While we don’t need to become apologists for the Taliban, you can see how they were able to exploit this established and structural class difference which bleeds the poor.
Q. Would you like to write about the Taliban movement?
A. Well I don’t know if I want to write about it. It’s a dark and difficult topic to write about. Nadeem Aslam has done an interesting book ‘The Wasted Vigil’ set in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It depicts a nightmare scenario where this dark movement of annihilation and fascism takes over. Talibanism is a fascistic movement, which has nothing to do with religion and humanity. It is born of an unnatural ‘madrassa’ culture. These kids have been institutionalized, cut off from the real world and from women and then completely brainwashed. Nadeem Aslam explores some of these points really well, even managing to humanize suicide bombers by exploring their thoughts in their final moments. I must admit these characters don’t interest me hugely, though I have sometimes toyed with the idea of working with the Lal Masjid story. Let’s see if I can...?
Q. What advice would you give future writers?
A. I would say work hard and don’t be afraid of your own creativity: don’t be embarrassed or inhibited about exploring yourself and your own truths. It takes a lot of courage and determination to get there but you do get there, especially if you feel that you have something important to say and you can develop the rigor to apply yourself. Also, if you want to write, don’t forget to read! It holds the key to good writing.
Q. Would you say, write about what you know best?
A. No I suspect if you do that, you’d get bored of it quite soon. Dedicated research is what I would recommend. I like to write about things that are new to me. When I started to write about Sindh, I had no idea about it and now I’ve learnt tons. And one of the tragedies of Pakistan is that it is a largely agrarian cultural where the urban elite have no idea about the rural masses.
Thank you Ms. Ahmad for taking the time to talk to us at length about your work. We look forward to reading your new novel and watching the new screenplay.
We wish you the very best in all your future endeavors.
Till next time, Khuda Hafiz
Aaliya Naqvi-Hai
aaliya@pakusonline.com